SlapClap

(click to enlarge) (artwork courtesy Matt Maloney — mybigmuddy)

Historical Background

Event

A covert team of blind assasins known only as “The Invisible Fist” revealed themselves from amid the crowd and deliberately executed 43 members of the drum circle and a local housewife who had heard the rhythms and stumbled into the park by chance. The entire spree of violence lasted only an estimated 12 minutes with none of the perpetrators apprehended.

(more…)

(artwork courtesy of Matt Maloney @ mybigmuddy; click to enlarge)

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY short lived NBC family situation comedy Tie-Dye Ninja made its on-air debut. The shows focus centered on a teenage ninja-in-training named Naruto who is instructed by his Master House to move to suburban Connecticut and enroll in a typical American high school as a test of his willpower in the face of modernity. But on Naruto’s first day he befriends the children of the Rosepopper family and the two sides form an unlikely bond.

Tie-Dye Ninja debuted amid a backdrop of violent outbursts between the two warring factions of ninja’s and hippies, and suffered poor ratings as a result. Its final episode, “The Sword of Detention,” scored the lowest Nielsen returns in the history of television. The show has the distinction of being the only network program in modern television to go unarchived. A year later, the network reworked the format and scored a much larger hit with the half-hour comedy Family Ties.

SlapClap was saddened today by the news that Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann, the man who discovered the drug compound LSD, died at the age 102 on Tuesday from sword wounds. The attack took place outside his country home during a benefit concert to raise money for a Phil Lesh statue in the Swiss capitol of Bern. Hoffman and his paramour Mountain Girl were retiring to the front porch after a truncated five and a half hour set by the band New Riders of the Purple Sage when 3 ninjas jumped from Hoffman’s Terra Cotta roof using Ukemi form and pulled out Katanas attached to their Obi’s. This marks an escalation in hippie/ninja violence after a decade of peace.

Ninjas declared war on hippies in 1968 as the result of a succession of seemingly minor incidents. In 1967 a DayGlo van of Merry Pranksters crashed into a specialized weapons and tactics outpost killing two ninjas and the only North American Samurai lord. Then the following year author Tom Wolfe released his The Electric Kool-Aid Test with no mention of the ninja deaths, instead making heroes out of the van of guilty Mary Pranksters.

To this day the van accident is the only recorded killing of ninjas by hippies in the world, but since 1968 there have been 345 hippies murdered by the oniwaban in name of blood revenge … 346.